Leonardo Vergani

Hey, Intercom published a blogpost with their templates for everything related to Product Marketing, including a Positioning template. You can read the blogpost here: https://www.intercom.com/blog/how-product-marketing-helps-build-product/ Specifically, the positioning template is available here (non-gated link): https://intercom.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Positioning-Guide-Template.docx The key elements are: * Product * Product Mission * Product Vision * Pitch to Buyer * Pitch to End-user * Product description * Core pillars (key features) * Customer * Why people will care * Who will buy * Keywords they are searching * Customer examples They also describe the competitors and the state of the industry! :)

I had to coach a few people on messaging on my past role, which pushed me to develop a structured approach to coach inexperienced product marketer on writing compelling messaging. What follows are my go-to three steps to ensure a new employee can differentiate good from bad messaging, learn how to frame their messaging in a way that resonates with our personas and validate this message with users before launching. 1. Distinguishing good vs. bad messaging Obviously, this is a skill that comes with experience, as @Jeffrey Vocell mentioned. However, I came up with a few exercises and rules that can help accelerate the learning process. The first step is to read the messaging from other products. Or even older versions of your copy. It is ideal that you pre-select copy that you think has a problem and use it to push your mentee to learn the key concepts. The examples could highlight issues such as: - Generic copy (or words) - Feature-driven copy (or too complex/technical) - Copy targetting too many personas - Copy targetting no persona After they go through one of the examples, you both should discuss a few questions: - What is the messaging trying to convey? - Who are they targeting? - What problem does the persona (buyer or user) probably face? What are their goals? - What do see when you read this copy? What do you feel? (By “see” I mean what images/scenes come to your mind) From my experience, this is enough to show your mentee what bad messaging means. This discussion is very likely to show your mentee that there are commonly used words that add no content to the copy (or, those words could mean different things to different people). If this happens, I would suggest creating a list of prohibited words. The words that usually come up are: - Simple - Easy - Powerful - Complete Although “simple”, for example, could be useful to describe the benefits of your product, I find that customers do not understand what that really means to them and how that is going to change their life - the “how” is not clear and it causes confusion. Go over as many examples you need, but give them time to fully comprehend the concepts between each learning session. 2. Reframing the narrative As @Steph Kong mentioned, most junior PMMs struggle with framing a narrative starting with benefits (or use cases). Usually, they frame it using the features. However, this frame is not ideal for your users, as they are now responsible for connecting the dots and understanding how your new feature (or product) can solve a problem for them and improve a business metric that they care about. To prevent that from happening, I created a very simple framework that is used before writing any launch content: For each feature, you have to describe the use cases and business benefits. Also, you have to break it down by persona. This approach works because starting with the features feels natural to most junior PMMs (and that is how PMs communicate the updates to your team). In addition, after you fill all the boxes, you will have a complete list of the use cases enabled by those new features and the business benefits by persona (or user/buyer) Now, instead of launching each feature, you can bundle them by business benefit or use case. As a result, your launch post would be framed in a way that makes sense from the point of view of the customer. Also, writing down all the use cases and benefits creates an opportunity for you to discuss which use cases you want to highlight for each persona and how that should drive other launch decisions. 3. Researching and collecting feedback (pre- and post- writing the messaging) The last step would be to guide the junior Product Marketing Manager in doing research and collecting feedback from customers and prospects. Research should be done prior to writing the message. The goal here is to better understand your users and buyers and enable your team to answer: - What is the current situation of your personas? - What are the use cases they are describing? - Which words do they use to describe the problem, their feelings, and the solution? This should guide the entire messaging. From my point of view, most of the claims that you make in a message and the use cases/benefits that you highlight should be backed by this research. Otherwise, you are just guessing. Finally, after the first version of the copy is written, you should gather feedback from a few users. The goal here is to understand: - How do users react? What excites them? What bores them? - Is your copy easy to follow and understand? - Do they believe in your promise? Or is it too good to be true? From my point of view, if you follow this step by step with a junior PMM, they will quickly learn the key moving parts of great messaging. Comment below if you would like me to expand on something. Or if you had a different experience!

I tend to think that product launches are delayed more often than not. Because of that, the expected delays should already be part of your planning. Also, there are a few workarounds you can use to deal with unexpected delays. I will go through both below. 1. Planning (or Before the delay happened) Improving planning Most organizations push product managers to promise deadlines that are not realistic. Therefore, there is a lot of value on improving PM’s planning to properly estimate how long a new project is going to take. Ideally, PMMs and PMs should estimate how long past projects took based on complexity and compare it to the original estimations. Also, it is common for junior teams to forget to buffer for testing, betas and unexpected bugs. Therefore, asking them to do it could improve your planning process. Adding a buffer for the launch Based on your previous launches, you can estimate the average delay. From my personal experience, it usually ranges from 2 to 4 weeks. Therefore, plan to launch 2-4 weeks after the date Product gives you. Creating a plan B It is harder to deal with a product delay if you do not have a plan B: you have to negotiate with every team (marketing, sales, and customer success) to rethink your launch dates, training sessions, etc. It’s a mess. Therefore, plan ahead and incorporate a plan B. - What should you do if the product launch is delayed? - Which teams are going to be involved? - Do I need to change the internal training sessions or only the external launch events? - Can we previously agree on how to deal with a delay with Marketing (e.g., if we need to delay by 2 weeks, which campaigns can we anticipate?) What about other teams? Adding more touchpoints with the Product team Another source of improvement for some teams (especially if PMMs and PMs are learning to collaborate) is to discuss deadlines adjustment on your weekly meetings. If you create a space on the agenda for this discussion at every meeting, PM will feel more comfortable sharing expected delays earlier and you will have more time to replan. 2. Workarounds (or After the delay happened) However, planning sometimes is not enough and the product will be delayed anyway. There are a few tactics you could use to work around the situation. Announcing before the launch The easiest one is to maintain the same announcement day, but launch the features at a later date. Not much to add here. The pro is that you do not need to change your launch plans, but the con is that your campaign will generate buzz before users can actually try the new features. To minimize this issue, you should create a CTA that enables you to identify users/leads that were interested in the feature to follow up with them again (through marketing, sales or customer success). Launching whatever is finished If your team was not able to finish all the features, you can still launch whatever is ready. The upside is launching and enabling users to try new features as soon as possible (which could improve satisfaction, churn, etc). Also, your sales team might be needing those additional features to increase conversion rates. The downside is that the launch story might be weakened if you do not launch everything. Also, it could be difficult to lanch the missing features in the next cycle. Mixing with another launch Another alternative is to postpone it and launch on the next cycle (bundling with other features). The pro is that you do not have to make changes to your overall launching plan. However, it could become messy if you have launch themes (e.g., security features for month A, new reports for month B), as the launch would become too large and the message wouldn’t make sense.

Although @Mary (Shirley) Sheehan and @Mark Officer already posted great answers, I would like to add two other great sources. 1 ) A source of data is reading what their employeers are posting on LinkedIn (through posts, summary or job descriptions). From those descriptions, you can learn: - Projects: which projects are they prioritizing? What could be rationale behind it? - KPIs: which metrics are they reporting (or bragging about)? Usually, those are the metrics the leadership is pushing their employees to track/improve - Organization structure: by looking at roles, you can see which kind of roles they are hiring for. In addition, you can guess how is the team structured (by customer size, industry, location, product, etc). If they are structured by industry, for example, this could give you an idea of where they are going next (e.g., focus on health care). 2) Also, you could interview current or previous customers of your competitor. Instead of reading reviews (which are a great source), you could interview your competitor's customers directly and ask them to demo you how they use the software. Depending on the seniority of the customer and how much you are willing to pay for this interview, you can get a significant number of customers.

As a Product Marketer, you get things done through other people. Also, you won’t have formal authority over most of the people working with you. In this scenario, your ability to connect with and influence people (especially peers) is crucial to succeed in the role. Given this situation, I believe having a sense of how other teams work is key to increase your influence across the organization. To do this properly, there are three things you should learn about each area you collaborate with: what is driving their decisions, how they work and how you can influence them. What is driving their decisions You first need to understand their business, operational and personal goals. This is going to drive their decision making and you can leverage that do ensure you are suggesting (or asking for) for help on tasks that are connected to the goals they are pursuing. A few examples of goals for the Marketing team could be: - Business goal: increase loyalty (e.g., increase the number of customers that buy more than once) - Operational goal: send more e-mails to current clients to increase repurchase rates by 4pp - Personal goal: learn how to write more targeted copy When you understand their goals, you can focus on pulling three levers: -Clearly stating how your request is connected to the goals they are trying to achieve - Directly helping your peer achieve their goals (to strengthen your relationship) - Pushing the organization to change their goals (takes longer, but could be the right approach) How do they work Next, after you learn their goals, it is important to learn how they work. Here, you should deep dive into high-level processes and workflows. You should learn how key process work (as they could become bottlenecks for your projects in the future): - How are the teams prioritizing their work? When are they doing that? - How frequently they meet to discuss goals and rethink strategy and/or tactics? - What is the process and how long it takes for Marketing Ops to run an analysis? - How early you must request a social media post? Is the process different for email marketing? When you learn the processes each team is running, it is easier to collaborate and request things at the right time and using the right format. Also, pushing to understand it shows that you care, and caring is the fastest path for a great relationship with your peers. How you can influence them Now, you understand their goals and motivations and learned the process they follow to get things done inside the organization. Through this process, you are going to build credibility and trust, key elements for any successful peer-to-peer relationship. With your newly built trust, you can start pulling the lever I mentioned on the first block of this answer. Risk: understanding too much As it is clear from my answer, I believe that understanding what your peers are doing is crucial to succeed in this role. However, there is a risk in knowing too much about other people’s role: you can become too opinionated and step on other people’s toes. Therefore, it is important to find a balance between understanding what they are doing to increase your influence vs. to tell them what to do.